Microsoft’s biggest cloud announcements at Build 2016

When it came to Cloud computing at Build 2016, Microsoft’s main focus appeared to be all about encouraging more organizations and developers to jump on board. Here are Microsoft’s biggest announcements made at Build 2016:

The tech giant made Xamarin available to every Visual Studio developer for free and are offering a free version of Xamarin Studio Community Edition for OS X users. Also, as part of the .NET Foundation, Microsoft also revealed a plan to provide open source Xamarin runtime, libraries and command line tools which can be used alongside Microsoft DevOps and Enterprise development tools.

A preview of Azure Functions was revealed. Azure Functions lets, “developers easily handle on-demand tasks that respond to events, common in Web and mobile applications, IoT and big data scenarios,” according to Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie. “Working across Azure and third-party services, it enables developers to write functions in a variety of languages, such as JavaScript, C#, Python and PHP, with the ability to automatically scale out to meet demand, only charging for the time a function runs,” he says. “And with an open source runtime, developers will be able run Functions anywhere – on Azure, in their datacenters or on other clouds –taking flexibility and choice a step further.”

Azure IoT Starter Kits were announced. These can be used for anyone on a Windows or Linux machine. Azure IoT Gateway SDK, along with device management in Azure IoT Hub were also revealed. These will help connect older devices to the internet.

It was stated that NoSQL service DocumentDB will now communicate with applications by using existing Apache License MongoDB APIs and drivers. “This extends the reach of DocumentDB, a proven service that enables companies like NextGames, makers of the multi-player Walking Dead video game run on Azure, to handle 75 billion requests per day,” Guthrie claims.

Microsoft’s microservices application platform, Azure Service Fabric, has been made widely available. Azure Service Fabric is used to help applications and services stay online and provide uninterrupted service and is behind services such as Azure SQL Database, Azure Document DB, Cortana, and Skype for Business.

Previews of Service Fabric for Windows Server and Service Fabric for Linux and Java APIs were also revealed.